Any Laser Disc fans here?

BroonsBane said:
I had a chance to buy the original release Star Wars Trilogy from a friend of mine but I passed. Those are movies that I would dearly love to add to my small LD collection.
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I've got doubles, the box set and the individual discs. Haven't watched the box set yet (commentary on the analog tracks), but I'd part with the individual discs. Let me know if that interests you at all...they're all wide screen CLV (the box set is all CAV). Not sure of protocol, PM me if this needs to be off-forum.

je
 
I bought the original Pioneer Laserdisc player in 1983 along with the 50" Pioneer front projection TV, which I still have. Updated to newer Pioneer Players three times since then. Removed the Laserdisc player from my HT system about two years ago and haven't missed it. Don't get me wrong, Laserdiscs were much superior to any other recorded video medium for many years, but along came the DVD and now HD-DVD. I have more than 50 Laserdiscs which will I don't think will ever get played again. Any DVD duplicate I have has much better picture and sound. This includes the Eagles "Hell Freezes Over", all Star Wars discs, Lion King, and others.

If anyone is looking to buy any discs and/or players, I'm the man!! Prices will be very reasonable. Shipping a stack of discs may be a little pricey, though.
 
Count Me In!! I've got a Pioneer CLD-D504 that was virtually brand new (had been used maybe under 5 hours total) when i bought it a couple years ago. It's cool that it can play audio CDs as well as LaserDiscs :D
 
i am 25 and a self-proclaimed LD-phile. i own a pioneer CLD-3030(1988) with less than 30 hours of use and about 25 discs, all of which i will cherish beyond the day i die. i look to expand my collection any chance i get and i'm predominantly looking for anime(JAPANESE ANIMATION) LDs. basicly, the only ones released domesticly were pioneer (of course) and animEigo releases. with pioneer handling tenchi muyo, moldiver, el hazard, phantom quest corp, ETC. and animEigo covering bubblegum crisis and various others. i have been a budding laserphile for seven years now as the technology fascinates me. not to mention there are some of the most beautiful looking players out there of any format ever.(CLD-3030,-3070,-91,-92 and the LD-S1 come immediately to mind) PS. if anyone has got a complete 8 episode LD collection of bubblegum crisis that they want to part with, i would be highly interested.
 
I have one of the better players, a Pioneer CLD-703, and about 30 movies. Would like to find some concert LD's locally.
 
Laserdiscs never really caught on. They were first available in about 1981 and Pioneer tried until the mid-90's to get people to buy them. Around here, even some libraries had them to check out. The picture and sound was far superior to VCR's. But, when Beta introduced Hi-Fi sound in the mid 80's, and later others with VHS Hi-Fi, the sound quality advantage of Laserdiscs went away. There were very few players capable of reproducing the AC3 Dolby Digital soundtracks many Laserdiscs had by that time. Then, when the DVD was introduced, with better video, 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, and much longer playing time per side, it was all over for the Laserdisc.

There doesn't seem to be a contingent of diehards like there is with vinyl records vs. CD's and vacuum tubes vs. solid state circuits that refuse to accept new technology.
 
LD died because you could record to vhs.
I believe there was a few LD recorders but were extremely expensive for normal consumers to buy.
VHS format was also cheaper.
 
Ok then. Imagine if you could make a LD with todays technology just how much play time would be on each side.
 
"Today's technology" as in compressed audio/video?

Well, I don't know...I bet it could be figured out...somehow.

I did start a thread on here at one point, asking how much music a 12" LD could hold--just make a giant redbook CD out of one...somebody replied stating that early-on in the development process of the redbook format, in the 70s, Phillips did a concept of what would become the "compact disc" however, it was 12"--like an LP....apperantly it held something crazy like 13 HOURS of music per side...I am assuming that would be 13 hours under standard compression no different from a standard size CD just bigger.

I don't know if any of this is true...but interesting.

What I want to know is why no double-sided redbook (music) CD's where ever made...It's totally possible, they did it with LD, they do it with DVD, you've got that hybrid dual-disc crap one side redbook, the other side, CD, so why not both sides CD...wouldn't that have been easier to deal with for, say, double live albums? One side is what we know as "disc one" the other side is what we know as "disc two"
 
qpagoda and I did a bit of thrift shopping Sunday and Monday, and we saw 40 or so LD's in a local Goodwill. Several James Bond, and a bunch of other stuff I can't recall. Most of them were "Deluxe Widescreen Edition". If anybody wants some of them, I'd be happy to act as unpaid middleman. I think they wanted $4 each, but I could try to get them to come down some.
 
I have a Pioneer CLD 1070 that has always and still does work fine. I have about 120 LDs - mostly concert but a few movies. I never see any LDs at garage sales or anywhere else so I feel like "what I got is what I'll have"!
 
I just about doubled my LD collection, thanks to, of all things, a hardware store that went out of business in PA. Lots of good discs, and mostly widescreen: all 3 Star Wars (not the one-box trilogy), The Wall, Heavy Metal, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Criterion release of A Night At The Opera, and the CAV Toy Story box, to name a few.

I also managed to find a lot of 3 commercial-grade Pioneer LD-V4400s for $30. I have one hooked to my ProScan and wow, what amazingness.

PS to Zeromancer: I remember those recordable LaserDisc machines. They were LaserRecorders. Had to deal with them at my first TV station. We aired all our spots and promos from them. The discs were in plastic caddies and even then got scratched to hell so only select parts of the disc were usable. Maybe that's why we had to swap optics in the damn things so often. But they looked great on-air when they worked!
 
I took a count (or tried to) and have ~556 LDs not including duplicates (but including different releases of the same film, such as a CLV and CAV version of the film).
 
Most were actually purchased from a single collection, I bought about 80 from another person I found on craigslist and maybe 40 through a couple of ebay auctions. My girlfriend has maybe 50, purchased from a single ebay auction.
 
I have a CLD-704 and still have about 150 LDs. I keep the machine and discs to watch pictures that aren't out on DVD yet (Seven Women, Taras Bulba, The Lighthorsemen, A Child is Waiting, Wagonmaster) or pictures that aren't worth replacing with DVDs (Hotshots, Young Man with a Horn, Brady Bunch ) and pictures where the LD is the definitive version (Zulu, Grease, the special edition Waynamo).

I reckon I've thrown hundreds of the things away and just tonight culled through for duplicates of pictures I now have on DVD, found a bunch--Sgt. York, Charge of the Light Brigade, Sgt. Rutledge, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Helen of Troy, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Blues Brothers, Farewell to the King and about a dozen others, all go in the trash Friday.
 
Kinda wasteful to throw them out. If anyone is tossing them I'll gladly pay the shipping for ones I don't have, and I hate to see them go to waste.
 
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